IME: Breaking free from I/O bottlenecks with Burst Buffer technology

The largest compute systems in Oil & Gas have become nearly 20 times faster over the past five years, which means there is a growing performance gap between compute and I/O that poses a threat to scaling performance to Exascale levels. Traditional architectures are further accelerating IO bottlenecks. Increasingly leading Oil and Gas companies are looking at Burst Buffer based architectures that eliminate the IO bottlenecks. By buffering and aligning I/O, a Burst Buffer can drive a parallel file system at close to max hardware speeds and sustain peak workload performance requirements, making it a logical fit for extreme scale Oil & Gas applications. Most importantly, Burst Buffers have demonstrated unprecedented acceleration for key oil and gas codes like Reverse Time Migration, by accelerating RTM by 300% without any code modifications.

In this presentation, we will discuss the motivations for using a Burst Buffer, provide an overview of recent results achieved on production Reverse Time

Presenter’s Bio:

Steve Crusan is a systems engineer working at DDN focusing on high performance computing in the Oil and Gas space. Before joining DDN, Steve was an HPC Systems Engineer (and a DDN customer) for 6 years, with roles in Life Sciences/Academia, Argonne National Laboratory, and financial services.